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Nvidias CUDA monopoly will end itself. Nvidia is pushing upmarket, focusing on data center products it can charge huge amounts for. As Nvidia pushes upmarket,

Nvidias CUDA monopoly will end itself. Nvidia is pushing upmarket, focusing on data center products it can charge huge amounts for. As Nvidia pushes upmarket, the traditional computing market forces will come into play. These forces have played out for 50 years. Users will seek cheap and available GPUs and they’ll find a way to get the job done with them. At the moment, people say they can’t use retail GPUs because of RAM constraints. This will change however. Through necessity, software will be developed that gets the job done on consumer grade GPUs. It might be open source. It might be AMD or Intel software. This has always been the way with computers…. innovation at the low end will foil the plans of IBM to control the entire market. Oops did I say IBM? I meant Nvidia. Nvidia has the chance to own everything long term, but monopolists can’t help but become greedy and become their own worst enemy. Nvidia is milking its customers for huge, huge profits. The customers will find another way, this Nvidia will have indirectly created its true competition. If Intel and AMD want to defeat Nvidia they need to not play Nvidias game of going for the high end and turning its nose up at the low end. AMD and Intel need to produce the lowest cost, most powerful GPUs they can. They also need to attack Nvidia where it hurts. Nvidia has artificial constraints on its GPUs. Through drivers it prevents certain uses so that customers are forced to use high end data center GPUs. Where ever Nvidia has artificial constraints, AMD and Intel need to NOT have those constraints. Where Nvidia is closed source, Intel and AMD need to be open source. Nvidias dominance won’t end, but it’s monopoly will, and viable competition will form simply because Nvidia is so anti consumer, and in the computing game consumers are very resourceful. What’s needed is a bunch of smart programmers who know how to squeeze usable AI out of a 24 gigabyte AMD 7900 XTX.

mschuster91 3y ago
> What’s needed is a bunch of smart programmers who know how to squeeze usable AI out of a 24 gigabyte AMD 7900 XTX. The first thing that's needed is for AMD to wake up and invest into its tooling stack.
- PaywallBuster 3y ago
  That's the article we need What's AMD tools look like and what would it take to catch up with CUDA and I guess it does not depend on AMD alone, the cloud providers trying to get alternatives to Nvidia could be investing into this too
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    There have been tons and tons of articles about AMD needing to wake the fuck up, but they seem to focus all their efforts into their console business - not without reason though, both major latest-gen consoles use AMD SoCs, and that's a fairly stable market compared to the boom/bust that hit NVIDIA hard with crypto.
    - mrguyorama 3y ago
      The reason (IMO) that AMD will never make ROCm actually comparable to CUDA is so that they don't have to worry about their gaming GPUs cannibalize their data center GPUs. nVidia is stuck putting tiny VRAM pools onto gaming GPUs so they are less attractive as compute, and AMD doesn't want to put themselves in the same position. Maybe at one point they wanted to beat CUDA, but they are pretty happy with the feature segmentation now.
      - mschuster91 3y ago
        > The reason (IMO) that AMD will never make ROCm actually comparable to CUDA is so that they don't have to worry about their gaming GPUs cannibalize their data center GPUs. At least by revenue, consoles are now the leader in gaming anyway, the PC market is shrinking - the old dudes crowd is aging out of hi-perf gaming (due to work and having kids), and the young crowd is either on hassle-free consoles or mobile). And a lot of the "gaming" GPU marketshare of the last few years were coin miners. If AMD wants to be known for something else than tying their future to two large companies who can always hop back to NVIDIA, they absolutely have to step up their compute game to make sure they at least have the ability to pivot, should either of their deals with Microsoft and Sony fall apart. NVIDIA is the best example, it's a miracle Soldergate didn't sink them entirely a decade ago. [1] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/report-pc-and-console-global-gaming-dipped-to-923bn-in-2022 https://www.gamesindustry.biz/report-pc-and-console-global-g...
phero_cnstrcts 3y ago
You do know that the CEOs of Nvidia and amd are family, right?
fxtentacle 3y ago
Geohot is working on AMD AI with tinygrad.
FloatArtifact 3y ago
Well I agree with VRAM restraints, I don't think low-cost hardware is the real barrier, although certainly part of the equation. There needs to be a true competitor to nvidia's AI stack cuda. ROCm is not supported across all of AMD's consumer range GPUs nor has feature parody with Cuda. The biggest issue nobody's matched the developer experience of Cuda. I'm not sure about the state of intel software stack or hardware. Amd hasn't reached hardware parody either with some of the specialized execution units that are available across all most of nvidia's products. Perhaps that's low hanging fruit for AMD? I'm looking forward to the day that somebody fully upturns this market with products that are available to end the consumers.
Certhas 3y ago
Given the current situation, this is wishful thinking/a long way off. Nvidia is considerably better at letting people get the job done on consumer grade GPUs than AMD.
- roenxi 3y ago
  Given the amounts of money and attention being bought to bear? It'll be 12-24 months or less. Tonight I'm going to play around with LLMs. I'm probably going to go to bed early because my AMD graphics card running ROCm (on an unsupported system and a probably unsupported graphics card) will eventually cause a kernel panic. In some sense that is unforgivable. In other senses, they are only 1-2 bugs away from being perfectly good enough and competitive with Nvidia for me. That isn't much of a moat. It usually takes an hour or so for the drivers to collapse and for those hours everything works great.
  - htrp 3y ago
    > It'll be 12-24 months or less. AMD also said this 24 months ago.
    - wmil 3y ago
      I think I've been hearing that ATI/AMD drivers are about to catch up with nVidia for 20 years.
      - avmich 3y ago
        You, for many definitions of "you", never work on a supercomputer. Despite the fact that today's smartphones are faster than a Cray-1 of the yesteryear. Similarly, you don't need to have ATI/AMD to catch the absolute performance crown from Nvidia, like AMD did several times with Intel, for you to use AMD solutions. We'll see how smart the market and the monopolist are this time around, yes, in the next 12-24 months... and maybe longer.
        gyrovagueGeist 3y ago
DeathArrow 3y ago
>What’s needed is a bunch of smart programmers who know how to squeeze usable AI out of a 24 gigabyte AMD 7900 XTX. What would be the motivation of said programmers? Who will pay them?
- captainbland 3y ago
  Presumably anyone who wants to to do AI work but doesn't want to get caught up in the expense and queues associated with the Nvidia data center parts and is willing to take a risk to get it done.
- LocalH 3y ago
  Heaven forbid a human do something not for monetary gain
- happymellon 3y ago
  Presumably the hope is, similar to Valve and Wine, there is a company that spends vast amounts of $$$'s on GPUs and so the cost of hiring a couple of engineers to fix the AMD situation isn't a large percentage, and they are able to predict massive amounts of savings. Whether the Valve situation strikes twice though isn't guaranteed. We already see all the other PC software stores continue to crowd around Windows providing apologies for its actions. If an AI firm can see past the next quarter, it could have huge ramifications.
paulmd 3y ago
People harp on the "NVIDIA pushing upmarket" but the reality is that NVIDIA is running their lowest operating margins since ~2011 right now, and that's with a secular shift towards high-margin enterprise products being rolled into those topline numbers. (cool bug facts: for the Q1 numbers, AMD's gaming division actually had a higher operating margin than NVIDIA as a whole including enterprise sales/etc! 17.9% vs 15.7%) https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NVDA/nvidia/operating-margin https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NVDA/nvidia/operat... https://ir.amd.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1146/amd-reports-second-quarter-2023-financial-results https://ir.amd.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1146/am... The new generations of goods simply are that expensive to produce and support - TSMC N4 is something like 3-4x the cost per wafer of Samsung 8nm, even with the smaller die sizes and smaller memory buses these products are actually some thing on the order of twice as expensive as Ampere to produce. Tapeout/validation costs have continued to soar at an equal rate, and this is simply a matter of physics, not something TSMC controls, therefore not something that can be changed by pushing profits around on a sheet. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tsmc-will-charge-20000-per-3nm-wafer https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tsmc-will-charge-20000-per... https://semiengineering.com/how-much-will-that-chip-cost/ https://semiengineering.com/how-much-will-that-chip-cost/ MCM doesn't really affect this either - this is about how many mm2 of silicon you use, not how well it yields. Even if you yield at 100%, 4x250mm2 chiplets is still 1000mm2 of silicon. And the cost of that silicon is increasing 50-75% for every node family you shrink. Memory and PCIe PHYs do not shrink, and cache has only shrunk modestly (~30%) at 5nm and will not shrink at 3nm at all. So at the low end you are getting an additional crunch where the design area tends to be dominated by these large fixed, unshrinkable areas. This is the fundamental reason that has followed NVIDIA on pricing for years now with products like 5700XT, 6800XT, Vega, Fury X, etc. TSMC N7 was already around twice as expensive per wafer as Samsung 8nm or TSMC 16FF/14FF. NVIDIA was using cheap nodes and AMD was being forced to use expensive leading-edge nodes just to remain competitive (and despite failing to take a commanding lead). They didn't follow because their cost-of-goods was higher - which is also the reason AMD cut memory bus width in RDNA2, along with PCIe width and things like video encoders on certain products. They were on the leading nodes, so they took the hit to area overhead sooner, and started looking for solutions sooner. It's not oligopoly, consumers just haven't adapted to the reality of cost-of-goods going up. AMD being willing to cut deeply on inventory at the end of the generation is one thing, but you also have to remember that the Gaming Division (RTG+consoles) is barely in the green right now and that's even with AMD signing a big deal for next-gen consoles that is more or less straight profit for them. They're losing money on RDNA2 hand-over-fist right now, this is a clearance sale at the end of the generation, not a sustainable business model. When they can undercut they have undercut - like 7900XT/XTX. The 4080 is fundamentally unsaleable at its current price, and 4070 Ti isn't exactly great either, and when AMD saw the sales numbers they cut the prices. That's the counterexample to oligoploy - they are willing to do it when they can. When they match pricing, or do a token undercut, it's usually because they can't afford to do drastically less than NVIDIA themselves, because they're affected by the same costs. For example Navi 32 (7700XT/7800XT) is going to be pretty unexciting because MCM imposes a big area/performance overhead and they simply can't go way cheaper than NVIDIA, despite the 4060 Ti also being an awful price. As such, the premise of your post is fundamentally false. AMD generally costs about the same as NVIDIA, and that's part of the reason they've failed to take marketshare over the last 10 years. It's generally a less attractive overall package with less features, other than sometimes having more VRAM (but not always, Vega had less than 1080 Ti, Fury X had less than 980 Ti, 5700XT had the same as 2070/2070S and less than 1080 Ti, etc). And this is because AMD is fundamentally affected by the same economics in the market as NVIDIA. And Intel will be too, when they stop running loss-leader products to build marketshare. Consumers don't like it but this is the reality of what these products cost to design and manufacture today. And you don't have to buy it, and if those product segments don't turn a profit they will be discontinued, like the $100 and $150 segments before this (where are the Radeon HD 7750s and 7850s of yesteryear?). That's how capitalism works, the operating margins have already been reduced for both companies, they're not going to operate product segments at a loss just so gamers can have cheap toys. Even if they do it for a while, they're not going to produce followups to those money-losing products. Nor is NVIDIA leaving the gaming market either. They'll continue to produce for the segments that it makes sense to produce for. The midrange (which is now $600+) and high-end ($1000+) will both continue to see good gains, because they're less affected by the factors killing the low end. And MCM will actually be incredibly great in the high end - imagine two or four AD102-sized chiplets working together. But it's going to cost a ton - probably the high-end will range up to $4k-8k within a decade or two. The low end will have to live with what it's got. AMD holding the 7600/7500 back on N6 (7nm family) is the wave of the future, and it seems like NVIDIA probably should have done the same thing with the 4060. A 3060 Ti 16GB for $349 or $329 would probably have been a more attractive product than a 4060 8GB at $299 on 4nm. Maybe give it the updated OFA block so it can use the new features, and call it a day. If $300 is your budget for a GPU, buy a console - the APU design is simply a more efficient way to go. A $300 dGPU is about 90% of the hardware that needs to go into a console, and if you just bolt on some CPU cores and an SSD you're basically there. The manufacturing/testing/shipping costs don't make sense for a low-end product (and $300 is now entry-level) to be modularized like this anymore, integration brings down costs. The ATX design is a wildly inefficient way to build a PC, and consoles eschew it for a reason. A Steam Console could bring costs down a lot, but it still will involve soldered memory and other compromises the PC market doesn't like (but will be necessary for GDDR6/7 signal integrity etc). Sockets suck, they are awful electrically and ruin signal integrity. The future is either console-style GDDR or Apple-style stacked LPDDR.
sva_ 3y ago
I think geohot is working on that with tinygrad. Activity on the ROCm repo seems to have increased a lot recently: https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/graphs/code-frequency https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/graphs/code-freque...
- roboror 3y ago
  Last I heard he's abandoned working with AMD products. https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/2198#issuecomment-1574383483 https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/2198#issuec...
  - sva_ 3y ago
    Does not seem so https://nitter.net/LisaSu/status/1669848494637735936 https://nitter.net/LisaSu/status/1669848494637735936 https://nitter.net/__tinygrad__/status/1688613617422495744 https://nitter.net/__tinygrad__/status/1688613617422495744 https://nitter.net/realGeorgeHotz/status/1686165811386597377 https://nitter.net/realGeorgeHotz/status/1686165811386597377
  - kanwisher 3y ago
    He had a phone call with CEO of AMD and she has been redirecting teams to start fixing issues. They seem to be motivated to fix their problems
pjmlp 3y ago
First Intel and AMD need to provide stable drivers, and a polyglot stack to program GPUs across C, C++, Fortran, Julia,...anything PTX, IDE and graphical debuggers tooling for all GPGPU layers, and powerfull set of GPGPU libraries. Then maybe, most researchers will chose anything other than CUDA.

mschuster91 3y ago

> What’s needed is a bunch of smart programmers who know how to squeeze usable AI out of a 24 gigabyte AMD 7900 XTX. The first thing that's needed is for AMD to wake up and invest into its tooling stack.

PaywallBuster 3y ago
That's the article we need What's AMD tools look like and what would it take to catch up with CUDA and I guess it does not depend on AMD alone, the cloud providers trying to get alternatives to Nvidia could be investing into this too
- mschuster91 3y ago
  There have been tons and tons of articles about AMD needing to wake the fuck up, but they seem to focus all their efforts into their console business - not without reason though, both major latest-gen consoles use AMD SoCs, and that's a fairly stable market compared to the boom/bust that hit NVIDIA hard with crypto.
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    The reason (IMO) that AMD will never make ROCm actually comparable to CUDA is so that they don't have to worry about their gaming GPUs cannibalize their data center GPUs. nVidia is stuck putting tiny VRAM pools onto gaming GPUs so they are less attractive as compute, and AMD doesn't want to put themselves in the same position. Maybe at one point they wanted to beat CUDA, but they are pretty happy with the feature segmentation now.
    - mschuster91 3y ago
      > The reason (IMO) that AMD will never make ROCm actually comparable to CUDA is so that they don't have to worry about their gaming GPUs cannibalize their data center GPUs. At least by revenue, consoles are now the leader in gaming anyway, the PC market is shrinking - the old dudes crowd is aging out of hi-perf gaming (due to work and having kids), and the young crowd is either on hassle-free consoles or mobile). And a lot of the "gaming" GPU marketshare of the last few years were coin miners. If AMD wants to be known for something else than tying their future to two large companies who can always hop back to NVIDIA, they absolutely have to step up their compute game to make sure they at least have the ability to pivot, should either of their deals with Microsoft and Sony fall apart. NVIDIA is the best example, it's a miracle Soldergate didn't sink them entirely a decade ago. [1] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/report-pc-and-console-global-gaming-dipped-to-923bn-in-2022 https://www.gamesindustry.biz/report-pc-and-console-global-g...

phero_cnstrcts 3y ago

You do know that the CEOs of Nvidia and amd are family, right?

fxtentacle 3y ago

Geohot is working on AMD AI with tinygrad.

FloatArtifact 3y ago

Well I agree with VRAM restraints, I don't think low-cost hardware is the real barrier, although certainly part of the equation. There needs to be a true competitor to nvidia's AI stack cuda. ROCm is not supported across all of AMD's consumer range GPUs nor has feature parody with Cuda. The biggest issue nobody's matched the developer experience of Cuda. I'm not sure about the state of intel software stack or hardware. Amd hasn't reached hardware parody either with some of the specialized execution units that are available across all most of nvidia's products. Perhaps that's low hanging fruit for AMD? I'm looking forward to the day that somebody fully upturns this market with products that are available to end the consumers.

Certhas 3y ago

Given the current situation, this is wishful thinking/a long way off. Nvidia is considerably better at letting people get the job done on consumer grade GPUs than AMD.

roenxi 3y ago
Given the amounts of money and attention being bought to bear? It'll be 12-24 months or less. Tonight I'm going to play around with LLMs. I'm probably going to go to bed early because my AMD graphics card running ROCm (on an unsupported system and a probably unsupported graphics card) will eventually cause a kernel panic. In some sense that is unforgivable. In other senses, they are only 1-2 bugs away from being perfectly good enough and competitive with Nvidia for me. That isn't much of a moat. It usually takes an hour or so for the drivers to collapse and for those hours everything works great.
- htrp 3y ago
  > It'll be 12-24 months or less. AMD also said this 24 months ago.
  - wmil 3y ago
    I think I've been hearing that ATI/AMD drivers are about to catch up with nVidia for 20 years.
    - avmich 3y ago
      You, for many definitions of "you", never work on a supercomputer. Despite the fact that today's smartphones are faster than a Cray-1 of the yesteryear. Similarly, you don't need to have ATI/AMD to catch the absolute performance crown from Nvidia, like AMD did several times with Intel, for you to use AMD solutions. We'll see how smart the market and the monopolist are this time around, yes, in the next 12-24 months... and maybe longer.
      - gyrovagueGeist 3y ago

DeathArrow 3y ago

>What’s needed is a bunch of smart programmers who know how to squeeze usable AI out of a 24 gigabyte AMD 7900 XTX. What would be the motivation of said programmers? Who will pay them?

captainbland 3y ago
Presumably anyone who wants to to do AI work but doesn't want to get caught up in the expense and queues associated with the Nvidia data center parts and is willing to take a risk to get it done.
LocalH 3y ago
Heaven forbid a human do something not for monetary gain
happymellon 3y ago
Presumably the hope is, similar to Valve and Wine, there is a company that spends vast amounts of $$$'s on GPUs and so the cost of hiring a couple of engineers to fix the AMD situation isn't a large percentage, and they are able to predict massive amounts of savings. Whether the Valve situation strikes twice though isn't guaranteed. We already see all the other PC software stores continue to crowd around Windows providing apologies for its actions. If an AI firm can see past the next quarter, it could have huge ramifications.

paulmd 3y ago

People harp on the "NVIDIA pushing upmarket" but the reality is that NVIDIA is running their lowest operating margins since ~2011 right now, and that's with a secular shift towards high-margin enterprise products being rolled into those topline numbers. (cool bug facts: for the Q1 numbers, AMD's gaming division actually had a higher operating margin than NVIDIA as a whole including enterprise sales/etc! 17.9% vs 15.7%) https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NVDA/nvidia/operating-margin https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NVDA/nvidia/operat... https://ir.amd.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1146/amd-reports-second-quarter-2023-financial-results https://ir.amd.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1146/am... The new generations of goods simply are that expensive to produce and support - TSMC N4 is something like 3-4x the cost per wafer of Samsung 8nm, even with the smaller die sizes and smaller memory buses these products are actually some thing on the order of twice as expensive as Ampere to produce. Tapeout/validation costs have continued to soar at an equal rate, and this is simply a matter of physics, not something TSMC controls, therefore not something that can be changed by pushing profits around on a sheet. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tsmc-will-charge-20000-per-3nm-wafer https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tsmc-will-charge-20000-per... https://semiengineering.com/how-much-will-that-chip-cost/ https://semiengineering.com/how-much-will-that-chip-cost/ MCM doesn't really affect this either - this is about how many mm2 of silicon you use, not how well it yields. Even if you yield at 100%, 4x250mm2 chiplets is still 1000mm2 of silicon. And the cost of that silicon is increasing 50-75% for every node family you shrink. Memory and PCIe PHYs do not shrink, and cache has only shrunk modestly (~30%) at 5nm and will not shrink at 3nm at all. So at the low end you are getting an additional crunch where the design area tends to be dominated by these large fixed, unshrinkable areas. This is the fundamental reason that has followed NVIDIA on pricing for years now with products like 5700XT, 6800XT, Vega, Fury X, etc. TSMC N7 was already around twice as expensive per wafer as Samsung 8nm or TSMC 16FF/14FF. NVIDIA was using cheap nodes and AMD was being forced to use expensive leading-edge nodes just to remain competitive (and despite failing to take a commanding lead). They didn't follow because their cost-of-goods was higher - which is also the reason AMD cut memory bus width in RDNA2, along with PCIe width and things like video encoders on certain products. They were on the leading nodes, so they took the hit to area overhead sooner, and started looking for solutions sooner. It's not oligopoly, consumers just haven't adapted to the reality of cost-of-goods going up. AMD being willing to cut deeply on inventory at the end of the generation is one thing, but you also have to remember that the Gaming Division (RTG+consoles) is barely in the green right now and that's even with AMD signing a big deal for next-gen consoles that is more or less straight profit for them. They're losing money on RDNA2 hand-over-fist right now, this is a clearance sale at the end of the generation, not a sustainable business model. When they can undercut they have undercut - like 7900XT/XTX. The 4080 is fundamentally unsaleable at its current price, and 4070 Ti isn't exactly great either, and when AMD saw the sales numbers they cut the prices. That's the counterexample to oligoploy - they are willing to do it when they can. When they match pricing, or do a token undercut, it's usually because they can't afford to do drastically less than NVIDIA themselves, because they're affected by the same costs. For example Navi 32 (7700XT/7800XT) is going to be pretty unexciting because MCM imposes a big area/performance overhead and they simply can't go way cheaper than NVIDIA, despite the 4060 Ti also being an awful price. As such, the premise of your post is fundamentally false. AMD generally costs about the same as NVIDIA, and that's part of the reason they've failed to take marketshare over the last 10 years. It's generally a less attractive overall package with less features, other than sometimes having more VRAM (but not always, Vega had less than 1080 Ti, Fury X had less than 980 Ti, 5700XT had the same as 2070/2070S and less than 1080 Ti, etc). And this is because AMD is fundamentally affected by the same economics in the market as NVIDIA. And Intel will be too, when they stop running loss-leader products to build marketshare. Consumers don't like it but this is the reality of what these products cost to design and manufacture today. And you don't have to buy it, and if those product segments don't turn a profit they will be discontinued, like the $100 and $150 segments before this (where are the Radeon HD 7750s and 7850s of yesteryear?). That's how capitalism works, the operating margins have already been reduced for both companies, they're not going to operate product segments at a loss just so gamers can have cheap toys. Even if they do it for a while, they're not going to produce followups to those money-losing products. Nor is NVIDIA leaving the gaming market either. They'll continue to produce for the segments that it makes sense to produce for. The midrange (which is now $600+) and high-end ($1000+) will both continue to see good gains, because they're less affected by the factors killing the low end. And MCM will actually be incredibly great in the high end - imagine two or four AD102-sized chiplets working together. But it's going to cost a ton - probably the high-end will range up to $4k-8k within a decade or two. The low end will have to live with what it's got. AMD holding the 7600/7500 back on N6 (7nm family) is the wave of the future, and it seems like NVIDIA probably should have done the same thing with the 4060. A 3060 Ti 16GB for $349 or $329 would probably have been a more attractive product than a 4060 8GB at $299 on 4nm. Maybe give it the updated OFA block so it can use the new features, and call it a day. If $300 is your budget for a GPU, buy a console - the APU design is simply a more efficient way to go. A $300 dGPU is about 90% of the hardware that needs to go into a console, and if you just bolt on some CPU cores and an SSD you're basically there. The manufacturing/testing/shipping costs don't make sense for a low-end product (and $300 is now entry-level) to be modularized like this anymore, integration brings down costs. The ATX design is a wildly inefficient way to build a PC, and consoles eschew it for a reason. A Steam Console could bring costs down a lot, but it still will involve soldered memory and other compromises the PC market doesn't like (but will be necessary for GDDR6/7 signal integrity etc). Sockets suck, they are awful electrically and ruin signal integrity. The future is either console-style GDDR or Apple-style stacked LPDDR.

sva_ 3y ago

I think geohot is working on that with tinygrad. Activity on the ROCm repo seems to have increased a lot recently: https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/graphs/code-frequency https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/graphs/code-freque...

roboror 3y ago
Last I heard he's abandoned working with AMD products. https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/2198#issuecomment-1574383483 https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/2198#issuec...
- sva_ 3y ago
  Does not seem so https://nitter.net/LisaSu/status/1669848494637735936 https://nitter.net/LisaSu/status/1669848494637735936 https://nitter.net/__tinygrad__/status/1688613617422495744 https://nitter.net/__tinygrad__/status/1688613617422495744 https://nitter.net/realGeorgeHotz/status/1686165811386597377 https://nitter.net/realGeorgeHotz/status/1686165811386597377
- kanwisher 3y ago
  He had a phone call with CEO of AMD and she has been redirecting teams to start fixing issues. They seem to be motivated to fix their problems

pjmlp 3y ago

First Intel and AMD need to provide stable drivers, and a polyglot stack to program GPUs across C, C++, Fortran, Julia,...anything PTX, IDE and graphical debuggers tooling for all GPGPU layers, and powerfull set of GPGPU libraries. Then maybe, most researchers will chose anything other than CUDA.